Vietnam vets remember on anniversary of war's close

Whitehall man meets with his unit, many of whom hadn't seen each other since the war.

March 29, 2013|By Bill Landauer, Of The Morning Call

Tony Oliveira Jr. has the same nightmare every night.

It is 1966. Oliveira, then an Army specialist with the 1st Air Cavalry, stands in a rice paddy in Vietnam.

A little girl offers him a bottle of Coca-Cola.

Oliveira has been warned. A child offering you a Coke could be hiding a grenade.

Stay back, stay back, he tells the little girl. She doesn't listen. To Oliveira, she seems more afraid of whoever sent her than she is of him.

Oliveira shoots her in the chest.

" … and she blew up," he said nearly 50 years later from his home in Whitehall Township. "So had she come at me, she did have a grenade, she would have killed us both."

He'd kept quiet about it for decades, returning home from the war in the late 1960s and eventually landing a job with UPS. Every night when he went to bed, there was the little girl with the bottle of Coke.

Finally, last month, Oliveira met with nine members of his unit for a reunion in The Villages, near Orlando, Fla., and couldn't hold it in any longer.

He needed to know that somebody other than himself had seen the girl.

"I asked if any of them had been with me when I killed that little girl who might have been 7, 8, 9 years old," he said.

None had.

Forty years ago Friday, the last U.S. combat troops left Vietnam. At the time, popular opinion was largely against the war the U.S. fought from 1962 to 1973, and some Americans took it out on the troops. When Oliveira got off the plane home from Vietnam in 1967, for example, he said someone spit on him.

Four decades later, many Vietnam veterans are still coping with the war. But it's no longer America's ugly memory; today, survivors like Oliveira attend picnics, ceremonies and reunions.

"When Vietnam veterans reached their hometowns, many were not greeted with the appreciation and respect they very much deserved," Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said in a statement prepared to mark the 40th anniversary of the troops withdrawal. "In our time we must take every opportunity to thank all veterans and their families for their service and sacrifice."

Oliveira taped snapshots of the men he met in Florida to the side of his desk in three rows.

They watch when he's on the phone. Their eyes are wrinkled and their hair has turned white. But for Oliveira, years can't hide his comrades' faces any more than time can soften his memories.

"They're my brothers," Oliveira said.

They are members of Company A, 2nd Battalion, 12th Armored Cavalry, 1st Air Cavalry Division, U.S. Army. Others are probably still out there.

Oliveira has spent 46 of his 68 years searching for them. Armed with a desktop computer, a phone and his memory, he sits at the desk and tries to reach them on the phone or by letter. He estimates he's made about 2,000 phone calls. Sometimes, there's a long list of Sam Smiths in upstate New York, and he has to call each one. Occasionally, a state police trooper agrees to pitch in.

In February, the guys Oliveira has found so far gathered for the reunion. They wore black T-shirts with the yellow 1st Cavalry insignia on the breast. It was the first time many of them had seen one another since the war.

"I felt like someone had lifted a weight off of me," said Chuck Ingle. The 68-year-old from Bowie, Md., was a sergeant with Oliveira's unit, and the only one he'd kept in touch with over the years.

Ingle figured his other Army buddies were lost to him forever.

"I never had a brother," said David Hodges, several weeks after the reunion from his home in Mississippi. His voice broke as he spoke. "So seeing all those guys that had been a part of your past … it tears me up to think about it."

Some of the memories they shared were sorrowful — when trying to rescue wounded comrade Arturo Macaltao, enemy fire claimed two men. Others were funny.

The get-togethers are more than tonic for the soul. Oliveira is hoping his old buddies will help him obtain a Purple Heart for a wound he suffered during combat.

Groups of veterans can help one another navigate the bureaucracy of obtaining health care and benefits, said Clark Hamm, commander of the Breinigsville VFW.

Hamm came home from Vietnam in 1967 and "went into the closet." It wasn't until years later that doctors diagnosed his anxieties as post-traumatic stress disorder and began treating him with psychiatric counseling. Hamm had been treating it with whiskey.

Later, doctors discovered a chemical the U.S. government used to destroy tree cover — Agent Orange — had left him with heart disease that required surgery.

It wasn't until the late 1990s that Hamm could start going to reunions, and he found it was one of the only places he could speak.

"I found I was very uncomfortable around non-veterans," he said. "They don't understand. They just don't understand. The only way I can feel comfortable is to talk to a veteran."